Remember when Alex Len was good at basketball?

It shouldn’t be that hard. After all, it was only four months ago when Terrapins men’s basketball coach Mark Turgeon stood in front of the media and gushed about his new and improved center. After weathering a difficult first year in the States, the Ukrainian big man had fully grasped the English language and added 30 pounds of muscle. He was finally comfortable, and Turgeon was ready to coach him into one of the ACC’s best players.

Through the first 16 games of the season, that’s exactly who Len was. The sophomore was averaging 13.8 points, 8.3 rebounds and 2.2 blocks per game — all team-highs by a wide margin — and shooting better than 55 percent from the field.

But when the regular season officially moved past the halfway point a little less than three weeks ago, Len seemed to lose his footing. He’s averaging a pedestrian 9.6 points, 7.8 rebounds and 0.8 blocks over the team’s past five games, and he’s made just 46 percent of his shots in that stretch.

And on Wednesday night in Tallahassee, Fla., Len hit rock bottom. He scored four points, grabbed five rebounds and blocked one shot in 17 foul-plagued minutes, and was essentially a nonfactor down the stretch as the Terps suffered a heartbreaking 73-71 defeat at Florida State.

So what happened?

“I don’t have an answer,” Turgeon said after the game. “I didn’t even recognize him.”

The half dozen or so NBA scouts in attendance probably didn’t either. They had traveled to the Donald L. Tucker Center to see the 7-foot-1 center who many still project as a top-10 pick in the 2013 NBA Draft. Instead, they got treated to what was arguably Len’s worst college game to date.

He committed his second foul late in the first half and spent the final 6:29 on the bench. He didn’t score his first points of the night until the 7:44 mark of the second half. And he even missed an alley-oop dunk late in the game that would have given the Terps a three-point cushion.

In fact, Len performed so poorly that Turgeon praised backup forward James Padgett for his efforts against the Seminoles — he said the senior “played his tail off” to the tune of six points and three rebounds in 31 minutes — and said he was going to start playing to the team’s depth in the frontcourt.

Padgett is a serviceable backup, and Charles Mitchell and Shaquille Cleare are both having solid freshman campaigns, even if they are a little inconsistent. But relying on that trio over Len up front? It’s a notion that seemed implausible just weeks ago.

But recent games have shown Len isn’t quite ready to be a go-to guy. As his defenders have gotten bigger and stronger, he’s played smaller and weaker. So while it was easy for him to dominate the undersized centers who manned the middle for the Terps’ nonconference opponents, it hasn’t been so easy for him to adjust to playing against the likes of Florida State’s trio of 7-footers inside.

“We were just begging Alex: ‘You’ve got to give us something, you have to play better. If you play better, we’re going to win the game,’” Turgeon said. “And he didn’t.”

He might not for the rest of the season, either. Wednesday’s performance should prove an outlier in what will still end up being a solid campaign, but Len simply isn’t going to have the breakout season many expected entering this year.

NBA teams value potential over performance, so Len still looks like a future lottery pick. But, now that the Terps are in the thick of ACC play, we’re probably not going to see him play like it anymore.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

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